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An anonymous reader writes "A new study explains why girls do better at school, even when their scores on standardized tests remain low. Researchers from University of Georgia and Columbia University say the variation in school grades between boys and girls may be because girls have a better attitude toward learning than boys. One of the study's lead authors, Christopher Cornwell, said, 'The skill that matters the most in regards to how teachers graded their students is what we refer to as "approaches toward learning." You can think of "approaches to learning" as a rough measure of what a child's attitude toward school is: It includes six items that rate the child's attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility and organization. I think that anybody who's a parent of boys and girls can tell you that girls are more of all of that.' Cornwell went on about what effect this has had now that education has become more pervasive: 'We seem to have gotten to a point in the popular consciousness where people are recognizing the story in these data: Men are falling behind relative to women. Economists have looked at this from a number of different angles, but it's in educational assessments that you make your mark for the labor market. Men's rate of college going has slowed in recent years whereas women's has not, but if you roll the story back far enough, to the 60s and 70s, women were going to college in much fewer numbers. It's at a point now where you've got women earning upward of 60 percent of the bachelors' degrees awarded every year.'"

When it comes to girls learning, their styles of learning tend to be more aligned with the school structure we have in our current education system. Boys have a tendency to "Like Learning" later in life, once they have a better understanding of their physical world. This does not mean Girls are smarter than Boys, or the other way around, but they are just Different from each other, just as a Apple is Different than an Orange, and we should not try to do a one to one comparison.

Perhaps you're right, but unfortunately this has some pretty vast social implications. If 60% of the degrees are going to women, and women and men are in a roughly 50/50 ratio, this means that there are going to be a lot of well paid, socially and economically powerful women who can't find equals as mates.

As the father of a young, smart daughter, this makes me sad. It means most likely, if my daughter wants to have a family she's going to have to accept some low-life college dropout because he didn't find

Considering that through much of history men have married women with lower levels of educational attainment and income, and been able to be happy in those relationships without considering their wives "low-lives", I'm not sure why the reverse would be impossible.

It's because feminism has completely failed to address this part of the gender double-standard. They wanted equality, but on their own terms without any risk of role reversal. In the end, it's an Orwellian thing where all genders are equal but some genders and more equal than other genders.

It's because feminism has completely failed to address this part of the gender double-standard. They wanted equality, but on their own terms without any risk of role reversal. In the end, it's an Orwellian thing where all genders are equal but some genders and more equal than other genders.

Er, no. Feminism in its general sense doesn't specifically tackle this. Individuals and some groups might, and I'd strongly disagree with any who'd want this kind of double standard. Don't invoke Orwell so lightly. Role reversal is rare, yet it does happen. I know two guys who stay at home to take care of the kids. With the latter, the guy's pretty much sponging off of her. She earns good money, yet still comes home to cook his dinner. With the former, while the two of them had good careers, hers had substa

The problem with this whole thread is that it frames the role of the homemaker in a negative light - that role reversal is something to avoid. That somehow the spouse who stays home is a lesser person than the breadwinner. It's not a good stereotype to keep up - because the social pressure will tend to push the good people (like the second friend in your example) back out to work and leave kids to be raised by school and TV with less involvement from the parents.

You're exactly right - unlike AC's assertion, I don't see any backlash in feminism against role reversal in the home. Hell, gender equality is when we stop calling it "role reversal" and making assumptions on who does what. Who earns the income and who maintains the household should entirely depend on the people involved.

Lastly, I'm certainly not saying that it's impossible for two-income households to spend enough time with their kids, just takes a great deal more effort and it saddens me that it's become the norm.

Being a lady-engineer, I have personal experience of being rejected by men for being "too smart". Fortunately, it made it easier to avoid sexist, control freaks.

As for selecting a partner with lower education and income level, for me that was less of a concern than selecting a *partner* -- someone with similar interests who advanced the common prosperity of the partnership.

And as my gentleman-engineer partner tells his co-workers who complain about their own under-achieving wives, "You could have found have married a smart girl, too, if you had been willing to risk your ego."

...That's because men aren't going to announce to the world that they're intimidated by a smart woman. They'll meet, talk, hang out, but the end result is "I'm just not that interested." Hell, they likely don't even know the underlying reason they aren't that interested. Instead of dismissing a valid statement with sexist crap and unveiled insults at the poster's physical attributes, why don't we discuss the issue?

The problem they are pointing out has more to do with how students are graded, not how well they are learning. Since boys still have higher test scores (according to the article), it looks like they are still learning better in a school environment. The problem is how schools grade their students. If grades are too decoupled from the actual learning taking place, there is a problem.

Last year my son (diagnosed with mild autism) was required to spend 1/3 of his time doing group work in math class and consistently was graded poorly for these activities. In my mind doing group work in pre-algebra is of questionable value and useless for boys.

I disagree to an extent. Yes, there is some mooching going on, but the free tutors are actually learning more by teaching the subject than they ever would by passively listening (or less). If someone can teach it, then they have it down pat.

And something less useful is having a class full of kids who don't get it but the teacher can't get to them one-on-one to help out.

I agree, although I've never done a formal study. Girls may exhibit all the symptoms in TFA, but to me that shows true interest. Boys weren't interested because it was mostly a social playground, and most of the boys I know couldn't have cared less about all that. But most of the girls seemed drawn to school like flies and spent their free time thinking about it.

Certainly all the group work and social circle jerk that went on when I was in school was a huge turn off and a major cause for most of my class cutting. My sister went just for that, and I really think that's why she got disinterested in math and science where the mostly male teachers (laid off from defense companies back in the day) didn't have much use for that.

Certainly that's how my own kids are trending too. It concerns me because in spite of TFA, girls don't do as well in math and science later on (when it actually matters) and I don't really want my daughter falling in to the trap that most girls in HS seem to get in to and ending up with a BA in English Lit because "i'm dumb at math".

Group work sucks in general especially when it is forced on you in places where it shouldn't be. A great example of crap group work is in a pre-algebra math class, or in a college intro to writing class where you are trying to write a 10 page joke of a research paper. Now on the other hand group work in classes makes sense when working on a large project with like minded individuals who are equally motivated like in my robotics course where most projects were group projects but then it was filled with senio

I teach highschool math and physics, and by far, a disproportinate amount of my "better students" are female. I will not go as far to say that they are more or less smart (choose whichever difinition of smart that you like) than the male students, but the results among myself and teacher friends from across the region do not lie. The majority of female students I have can solve the assigned problems more accurately, and quickly than the their male counterparts. Is it attention span? Hormones? I can't say. It's merely an observation.

I teach highschool math and physics, and by far, a disproportinate amount of my "better students" are female.

One possibility: self-selection in your data pool, due to unequal gender expectations. You're teaching highschool physics. Chances are, if it's any of the upper grade or "advanced" levels, they're non-compulsary subjects. Your students don't have to take them. The students in your class are those that have decided to take the course. This means either they signed up because they want to take the co

I studied physics. The best mathemeticians in our classes were the girls. Why? No idea. They seemed to enjoy the pure abstract math and did their homework regularly. Most of the guys (myself included) had difficulty when the math got too abstract. Our bad homework skills showed too. On the other hand, our best mathemetician had a hell of a time figuring out how to apply the math to the physics. Fortunate for her, she was a mathemetician who was only taking physics courses as electives.

Everyone was mature and professional. We recognized our differences and figured the gender line was just a coincidence. Physics enrollment wasn't very high so the sample size was too small to be meaningful.

I should probably read TFA, but this is Slashdot. So, uhh, if girls do worse on standardized tests, how do we conclude they do better at school?

Let me guess. This is all going to come down to some kind of thing where when the girls underperform, we change the school, and when the boys underperform, we change the boys.

To try to keep a rant short, let's see why boys do so poorly. Could it have anything to do with rampant gender discrimination at the primary level and being forcefed feminist nonsense and guilt-tripping at the secondary level?

Jeebus. I remember many times when we did projects in class in elementary that the girls were given more options for what they could do than boys. Why? Well, everyone knows girls are more responsible than boys. One year even it was a school-wide policy that during indoor recess, the girls had the option to go to the gym to play basketball or volleyball, but the boys had to stay in their classroom.

Hell, I even remember one teacher I had who once decided to punish all the boys because of a few in the back who were acting up. Why? Well, we had it coming. I challenged the teacher about how it was fair to punish me when I hadn't done anything wrong, and I'll never forget the response. "You're just as well-behaved as a girl, but it wouldn't be fair to the rest of the boys if I let you off." Holy shit.

How about if we just get rid of gender stereotyping and discrimination? How about if we stop imprinting girls with math phobia? How about if we stop treating boys like they're already rapists and thugs?

The basic explanation described there is that the difference is in how teachers rate their classroom behavior: During ages 6-12, girls on average have an easier time sitting down, shutting up, and paying attention to the teacher than boys do. Since sitting down, shutting up, and paying attention are part of an elementary school students' grade, the girls grade better. That matches my own experiences in that age group, and also when working with kids in that age group: There are

Also, in my experience (in private industry) those who don't ask for raises don't get them. This is true for both men and women. So maybe it's not so much that companies want to pay women less, maybe they just aren't on average as assertive as men in asking for raises.

Before even clicking on the link, I knew this was an American study. Schools in the US, especially elementary schools, are massively dominated by women. Boys do generally have more difficulty sitting still for long periods, and need to use up their physical energy. This used to be handled by recess periods and sports. They could run around, play games, be competitive, get a bit tired - and be ready the next period of sitting still.

This is no longer allowed. Competitive sports are out, even pretty tame things like tag or dodgeball. Playgrounds have to be ultra-safe, which means utterly boring. Because virtually all teachers and administrators in elementary schools are women, there is very little understanding of boys' needs. They are expected to behave like perfect little...girls.

Business schools have spent some time on this. The best entrepreneurs are incapable of sitting through business classes. Education rewards good students, not successful people. If the goal of a society is to be highly conformist, then the current education system does well. However, America's competitive edge in the world is based on new non-conforming ideas.

There was a survey a while back that I heard some NPR commentators bantering about a while back (few years ago, tried to find a link but nothing is popping up)

We all know the standard stereotype is that men are threatend by smart/hard working women, look down at them, don't consider them good mates etc....

What they were finding was that these attridues were becoming less common in younger boys, and younger boys have been,more and more, indicating that they find intelligence and hard work attractive in women and don't really see just a "housewife" as a woman's place.

Leading me to remember an old quote about scientific theories and thinking it may apply to social ones:

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. -- Max Plank

I can tell you that many of the best GPA students at my school were some of the dumbest in the class. They were good at regurgitating data, but their comprehension was horrible. That's why they scored low on tests that required logical analysis. They just couldn't take the leap from one thought to another.

It's like an old co-worker of mine that a week after passing his Network+ certification, he truthfully asked me what a router was. He had no clue. He was just good at memorizing questions, and he spent a few weeks memorizing a ton of practice tests. He gamed the system. I pity any one who hires him thinking that he has any of the skills he's certified for.

There are many reasons I see girls do better in school on the whole. I think one of the main reasons though is that the majority of teachers tend to be women. These are women who took getting an education seriously, and often times know what worked for them to learn the subject. I think those teachers are often able to reach those that are similar to them. The interesting thing to me though is that I think competitiveness rises for the top spots in classes frequently from the boys still. They'll do anything

You're right, I've never been so aware of my own privilege until I found out that women are _required_ to spend more time and money grooming themselves. I'm convinced that neutral definitions of what it means to be sexist or racist are completely trumped by this finely referenced and balanced set of documents.

So whites can't be the victims of racism [independent.co.uk]? Males can't be the victims of sexism? You're seriously saying that?

You're the typical feminist. You whine about how there aren't enough woman lawyers, CEOs, and other white-collar, high paying jobs; but you're not out there picketing because they're aren't enough woman miners, crab boat fishers, and oil rig workers because those are physically hard and aren't glamorous.

Willingness to learn or willingness to jump through meaningless hoops?

I disagree with earlier posts about boys being smarter though. Girls are smart too, but their motivations are often a little bit different. The AC at the top seems like someone who tries to measure everyone else in terms of his own self-image and can't recognize other types of intelligence.

If women were really doing better then more of them would be in CS. It's improving, but their is still a huge gap. If they represent 60% of all Degrees but only represent 12% of CS Degrees then what Degrees are they being over represented in? They could easily be going into more fluff degrees which would make their quantity meaningless. Figure out why they avoid Math and Science before you go off saying they are doing better compared to Men. Until they do the same things that the Men are doing it's like com

"Most generalizations are false, including this one." -- Samuel Clemens

Anytime someone claims that group X is better than group Y at task Z, I usually call bullshit, and when the metric by which the standard is measured is a purely subjective and arbitrary one, doubly so.

People who generalize tend to do so because it absolves them of the need to apply critical thinking skills.

I'm not even that old but I can remember within my lifetime that it was just considered common-sense knowledge that obviously boys outperformed girls in school, and transparently had more of the traits of "attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility and organization". Yes, in the college math classes I currently teach most often the best work is being done by girls. But to look at that and say that there's some intrinsic property of girls that makes them more school-oriented is the most tunnel-visioned, provincial bullshit that I've read in some time.

The best comment I've seen so far is that the character of schools has changed, i.e.: over-protectiveness, lack of recess, rough sports, physical activity. There's some clear changes in schooling that have likely made a difference in the very recent past. The other thing I'd say is that all my acquaintances today let their children run around uncontrolled and screaming all the time, which is not something I ever saw growing up (i.e., restaurant last week: two separate families kids under the tables, pulling on curtains, handprints all over the mirrored walls, etc.). In the past boys got some real serious discipline; now I'd say that seems to be reduced, and perhaps they suffer more for it.

When I graduated from high school the top 5 students were all boys as I recall. When my sister graduated from the same school two years later, 7 of the top 10 were girls. Of course that's anecdotal, but it broadly seems to synch up with the sea-change that I've seen in my short life.

I think we need to ask why girls have a better attitude towards learning. Speaking as a teacher, I think that I can suggest a couple of factors and examples of why this is an important question.

TLDR: schools and schooling is overwhelmingly female oriented, and does not adapt to the needs of boys (nor anyone, really).

Schools, particularly primary (elementary for my American friends) schools are female dominated and, unfortunately, this leads to problems for boys. I taught in a school recently where I was the only male teacher at the school where there were some issues for boys. Whether there was a causative relationship or not is open to question, but the boys at the school were wild, and their achievement was substantially lower than the girls on several measures. I (simply because I was a male) was seen as the solution to an ongoing behavioural crisis among the boys in the older grades because I was seen as a role model as a boy who was interested in learning, but I think that by middle school, where I teach, it's too late for that to have much effect.

In fact, against the more influential male public role models who seem to be more interested in sport, driving, etc., than anything school-related, my effect would have been minimal (and I argued this point prior to my appointment, and my position was confirmed time after time through my appointment - in fact that failing was attributed to me which was fun). I have seen at other schools attempt to conflate an interest in sport with an interest in school by involving local sports people in reading programs at the school. The sports people come in to the school and inadvertently confirm students' beliefs, that sport and reading do not mix much. But it's a fun novelty, I suppose.

The other problem with female dominated schools is that the curriculum becomes more female dominated. At least in my experience, boys do have shorter attention spans, and do seem to have more kinaesthetic or visual approaches to learning (against girls, who more often seem to have auditory learning styles more suited to the "stand-and-deliver" lecture approach to teaching). Teaching in a single sex boys' class requires shorter lessons with more emphasis on doing stuff than discussing stuff, and this doesn't suit the approaches that a lot of teachers want to use.

Finally, there's a belief that boys are bad, whether this is explicitly stated or not, and, equally, that we should be easier on "boys being boys". In my work, I visited a school and sat through a presentation given by Year 1 students on school rules. Which was hilarious for a whole bunch of reasons, but most notably in the way that the activity seems to have been presented to the students. They were providing examples of good and bad behaviour. The teacher had chosen to tell the students to make a girl doing something good, and a boy doing something bad. The students then got up and use male pronouns for describing one scenario (where a student does something wrong) and female pronouns for describing the other (when a student does something right). The teacher corrected a student (a girl actually) twice when she said that she had drawn a girl doing something wrong, which had me on the verge of heckling the stupid woman.

As to being soft on "boys being boys", I believe strongly that we need to instil a sense of honour among boys. I had a Year 6 student a couple of years ago who incessantly physically and verbally bullied younger students and girls in the playground. I constantly brought him up on it, but was always held back from applying the school's discipline policy because "he doesn't have any great male role models", "you know his parents are really strict", or "he's just a bit energetic". The worst excuse that I heard from a colleague was that a girl he had bullied had to "share part of the blame" because she "instigated" the situation by talking to him (it's like a "she asked it by dressing that way" defence in rape cases). Over and over excuses were made for him by other staff su

There was an improvement in this situation during the 1940's, 1950's, 1960's, and 1970's - but our culture, particularly in the USA, has shifted back towards macho posturing, and money-earning, as the primary values. Much of "being smart" has to do with whether an individual nurtures an inherent intellectual capability, or whether they focus their time and energy on "other priorities" (social, religious, family, financial, athletic, etc.).

I think that a huge amount of intellectual talent in this country is wasted, because of this shift in priorities.Ultimately - people should have the right to choose an interest that they want. I don't think that it's possible or constructive to try to "Engineer" our culture. I think that most of our past idolization of intellectualism came out of our cold-war fear of being technically inferior to the Soviet Union and the Cold War.

(and also - as demonstrated by Germany, the Nazis).

We spent a HUGE amount of effort trying to specifically ENGINEER this cultural change. (and we were successful, in the short-term, but in the long-term, there has been a backlash. Hasn't there?) - We created NASA, DARPA, we had guys like Von Braun and Disney collaborating on publicly-funded propaganda films on educating our population about our future in space exploration and colonization. This inspired two generations of Americans to become scientists and engineers. We leapt so far forward, so quickly. But obviously, we were unable to sustain that. (there is no technical reason for that.)

Engineers and scientists have proposed solutions to these issues; sustainable energy, population control - but the "cool" people objected. Now, we abdicate control back to Nature. Maybe the females, who seem to no longer be constrained by the "macho" socialization, will figure this shit out.

The proof for a systemic, culturally reenforced feminist counterpart to your accusation exists in the law and the growing malaise towards men and boys in western culture these days. A quick overview of public school policy and university politics, television programming and advertisments, pop music, and (recently) video games, makes it quite obvious. Sadly, it is, for the most part, men who are at fault for this, men who've been convinced to feel 'male guilt' who then pass the laws and decree pro female bias in their organizations in attempts to 'prove' just how much of a feminist they are. It it sad they've internalized this insecurity and self-hatred as they assume the guilt because of having a penis. Basically it's stockholm syndrome exacerbated by misapplied notions of chivalry.

There is nothing wrong with an individualist agenda. You support it for girls and women, don't you? All that 'my body my right' (yet somehow his responsibility) and 'I don't need a man' egocentricity isn't individualist?

Your argument might be more convincing if you provided evidence that this cultural backlash against men has actually resulted in a structurally-supported norm of female privilege in each of the arenas you mentioned.

I'm sorry that you've been made to feel "male guilt" (while I'm female, I'm also white and have experienced similar discomfort dealing with my own privilege, so I know well what "white guilt" feels like), but your hurt feelings are not sufficient proof of the systemic subjugation of men (in the

The fact that men and women see the world somewhat differently doesn't mean that either sex is superior (and therefore neither is inferior.) Men are physically stronger than women, yet women shoulder most of the physical labor on the planet (on top of raising children.) Women are still virtual property in many countries and cultures. Even in America, the largest percentage of the poor are single mothers and their children (most abandoned by their husbands/partners.) Add the high occurrence of rape and assau

And most of the A-student girls I went to school with were dumb as cold shit compared to me on my laziest B-student day.

I had a 2.8 GPA in college and did a presentation on Smalltalk based mainly on the "blue book" for a programming languages class. Our de facto departmental valedictorian, who had pushing on a 4.0, was exactly what you described in terms of the waterworks and charm. She had to get someone to teach her Python because she couldn't learn it in a 1-2 week period well enough to write even basic

While it is true that he's supporting his argument with anecdotal observations, and he is a bit heavy handed, I'd say it's a pretty common observation.

I've noted pretty much the same thing going through school. My older sister and I were in the same Chem class at one point and were lab partners. I did the work, she got the A I got the B. It was very clear comparing our tests and labs, where we had extremely similar answers, that the teacher preferred her work to mine even though her work was mine with nicer hand writing. The end result is I finished university, got married and have a great job and she's a college drop out and depends on her boyfriend to support her, despite her perfect GPA being double mine all through school.

I'm not saying men in general are smarter than women, it just strikes me that in the general sense maybe we have different strengths. Grading in the school system favors the strengths of women and practical application favors the strengths of men.

I've also observed is several cases teachers, epically male ones, are more likely to provide help to female students as opposed to male students. This could have some affected on why girls seem to do better in a controlled environment where regurgitation of knowledge and complying with a superiors is more valued over practical application and challenging authority.

Of course it doesn't really matter, there could be thousands/. posters that identify the same thing and it'll always be anecdotal, sexist and untrue.

Well it is no secret, all our tests show women are more average. You get far less really smart ones and far less really stupid ones. You get a far bigger range in me, so if you are looking for someone above average intelligence, you will find way more men than women.

How this translates to grades is obvious. A really stupid person is going to get bad grades, and often a really smart person gets relatively bad grades as well because of "no child left behind" type teaching.

I too was a lazy screwup that passed with 'b's in every class while sleeping through it and doing no homework. That was because I was a genius and everything came naturally. I've only ever met 1 person that I can unquestionably say was my intellectual superior, and she was a chick.

And all of that has nothing to do with which side has the higher average intelligence.

You can be a B student and still be a genius. Einstein did very poorly in several subjects, most notably because he was board and didn't apply himself.

The way the grading system is setup doesn't favor critical thinking and practical application, it favors memorization and regurgitation, which for many is boring and leads to easy distraction, in-turn leading to poor grades. You can take a lot of those people any give them self study projects and they'll excel, but the school system favors people who are better at taking test and following directions.

I used to literally sleep through my classes. Fellow students complained. I still got all A's. Even without applying oneself, a genius should be able to grasp something that's so simple that it bores him, so no excuse for bad grades....unless we're talking highschool with petty tyrants like my math teacher who would take 50% off homework for not showing work.

Truth be told, I didn't get A's in languages, it was only last year that I grasped what a syllable was.

I concur. I went to a very wealthy public high school where there were multiple "tracks" one could be in mathematics. Your placement in one of these "tracks" depended on the teacher's recommendations from 6-8th grade. I did no homework, never raised my hand, never studied and still pulled down B+ averages through innate ability. Frankly, I was bored by the material. I was placed in lower tracks by the teachers. Meanwhile these girls who tested at C levels but stayed after school every day, kissed ass

So in short, you were a lazy fuck and got left behind, and they worked hard and got ahead? Wow, I'm shocked by that outcome. I'm sure once you join the workforce, you'll find that's totally not the case, and that people will reward you for your innate ability to pull B-level work with no effort.

He wasn't lazy, just bored. Most smart people that I know do horrible in school. My brother was failing 9th grade math, so my mom went and complained and got him put into 12th grade AP math and he got As.. Go figure.

I am very similar. I can't keep concentration on boring stuff unless I drug myself up with ADD meds, but then I lose my creative ability to problem solve, which seems to stem from my ADD.

I've had some fun talks with the Dr who gave me my ADD meds in college. He had a PHD in that kind of stu

this points to the real problem that this discussion should be looking into. I had similar issues, because I would ask the teachers if the goal was to learn the material or to do the work. I didnt do the work, but could pass the tests. I was viewed as a malcontent and actually asked to drop out of school. I was actually trying to get into the challenging courses because I was bored in the standard levels, but couldnt get reccomendations to move up because of poor scores. I consistently had very low particip

I once read a summary of a study that indicated this is somewhat wrong. Boys and girls both have roughly the same averages, but boys have a higher standard deviation. This means there are more "smart" boys and more "dumb" boys; but boys aren't smarter overall. It did mean that if you asked, "How many of [gender] have [intelligence at some high sigma]?" it would indicate there were more boys, unless you were looking for people around the median. No idea if this was ever corroborated but I thought it was interesting.

Following the rules, paying attention in class, and kissing your teachers' asses can only carry you so far without real intelligence to back it up. And most of the A-student girls I went to school with were dumb as cold shit compared to me on my laziest B-student day.

Time for a Calvin Coolidge classic:

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race

I don't see the additional bachelor's degrees or the additional brains as a guarantee of anything. The genius who flunks out of college because he discovers for the first time he actually has to study and actually has no idea how to do it is almost proverbial.

I submit my co-workers as a counterexample. Anything but rule followers. Nearly every woman I have worked with wants to do things her way and her way only, standards be damned.

That being said, the problem here is gender discrimination.

What do we do with this study?

The narrative here is that since girls are getting more college degrees that they're somehow better. Why do they earn less? Why do they do more poorly at standardized testing?

It could be that percent of degrees being awarded to women is a bad metric. I'd suspect it's simply because higher learning is simply more accessible to women. Let's skip over the gender-specific scholarships, because frankly they're probably not significant. How many women end up clashing swords with their families over trivial matters? How many parents try to push their daughters out to the streets instead of letting them stay at home while they finish a degree?

There's a whole lot of crap that's being missed by this troll story.

But boys are still smarter.

No, no, a thousand times NO. You cannot judge somebody by the contents of their pants. Ok?

That is the big fucking elephant in the room that gets missed every time here. We want gender equality, right? We want career women, right? What about house-husbands? Oops, can't have that, sounds too much like homosexuality and weakness.

Women are never going to be equal until we get rid of gender stereotypes. And I mean really equal, as in being required to sign up for selective service, as in protecting boys' genitals from mutilation as well as girls' genitals. And that will never happen as long as we continue to judge, categorize, and discriminate against our children by their body parts.

Socialization starts in the cradle. Are boys and girls different? Yes. I couldn't be transgendered if male and female brains were biologically the same. What that doesn't mean is that we can take women who have been told from day one that their biggest achievement in life will be having children and compare them to men who have been told from day one that if they don't get a real job it's the gutter for them.

The way forward in my view is to find some middle ground. Of course, I'd be happy just extending that same threat of "in the gutter" to girls and taking away benefits for getting pregnant (welfare, subsidized housing, medicaid etc). Of course put in the exemptions for rape, etc.

Either that or let's just give up on this whole idea of gender equality if we can't move past the men are expendable meme vs. protect women so they can get pregnant, fuck all who pays for the pregnancy and child care.

There's no insight here, no data. The parent just spews his own feeling that "girls are rule followers" and "boys are smarter". The scientists with actual data found that the qualities were actually "attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility and organization", but don't let science get in the way of your shit headed misogyny.

And yet this anti-science post makes it instantly to +5, why? Because it strokes the ego of the Slashdot anti-female crowd who think that feminists are coming to take their balls away.

No, they are thinking about the new clothes of that bitch sit on the next desk, and in the new hairstyle all the cool girls are using. They are also thinking about how they can get the most attention from their male counterparts. All in all men are busy thinking about useless things a lot less, rest assured.

When I was young all-boy and all-girl schools were going away. The feminists argued that it was discriminatory against girls.Then later the feminists started arguing that girls had to be separated from boys in class because they were intimidated by the boys.

Frankly I think single sex classrooms would be better. Taking away some of the sexual distractions. At the same time there is something to be said for mixed ed sex. Maybe what I would do is build all-boy and all-girl schools next to each other.

I had the good fortune to go to a mixed jr. high, and then an all-boys high school. The difference between the two, as far as being male is concerned, was staggering. The slightest cutting up, disruption, etc. at the jr. high was followed by a trip to the principal's office, a path I trod many a time. Naturally brilliant, I was bored to tears most of the time because of the dullness of my fellow students, and my outbursts were a way of keeping my sanity. While I got excellent marks, I was still branded a troublemaker.

In my last year of jr. high, my father challenged me to write the scholarship exams to a prestigious boys' school. I won one. And so I left a co-ed school for a male one. The atmosphere was completely different; moments of rowdiness would be tolerated by the master (there were no female teachers), but he would then instruct us to settle down, and the class would continue. Unlike the 45 minute periods at jr. high, our periods were only 35 minutes. The school realized that teenage boys have to get up and move frequently, which is why we still had recess each morning - unheard of at the public high schools. We also had an hour for lunch, giving us time to play ball hockey or basketball or touch football, and burn off some energy so that we could sit through the afternoon.

Wolfing down your lunch in ten minutes, playing 50 minutes of basketball with all the intensity teenage boys can muster, and then racing to class, tieing your tie with one hand whilst carrying your books in the other - it was thrilling. We would, literally, stampede through the halls in a way that wouldn't have been tolerated at public school. We were FREE to be BOYS, and I would not give up the memory of those days for anything.

With no girls to show off for, we competed at everything - academics, sports, arts, clubs - without fear of being labelled, for example, a 'browner' or a 'jock'. Many of us were a bit of both. The school encouraged you to be an "all-rounder", and while classes ended at 3:15, you were expected to participate in some extra-curricular activity until 4:30 or so. My friends at public high school envied that; most of their teachers were out the parking lot 10 minutes after the last bell.

Teenage boys, adjusting to the suddenly changed levels of testerone in their bodies, don't fit well into the female-dominated "sit still and be quiet" mode prevalent in the co-ed school. They need space and more importantly, time to move and burn off some of that raging energy. Women don't understand that at all, which is why so many bright young boys are being mis-diagnosed with ADHD/ADD/whatever, and being put on drugs because they don't fit into women's world view.

I had two beautiful and bright daughters, who chose public school. Had I had a son, though, I would have pushed him for all I was worth to go the school. I know he would have been treated like a young man there, with the understanding of a young man's particular needs, and not have been pushed into a feminist/schoolmarm charicature of what a boy should be.

Sure, because everything you do not agree with is trolling. The poster has a strong opinion about something that is different of yours, which he is entitled to have. Argue against it or stay quiet. You are the troll here.

Why inflammatory? He is just stating his opinion, which happens to be the same opinion many people have about this subject. He is given his anecdotal experience as fact. If you want statistical data, just look for it and you will find it. Choose any field, anything at all, anywhere, at any time of human civilization, at the top women are from rare to non existent. Do you need more evidence than that?

My explanation: Women tend to be more even. You get fewer geniuses, but fewer total morons as well. Look at lions - male lions are pretty much 'all or nothing'. They have to risk it all in order to mate and have offsprings. Females just need to gather enough food to feed themselves and their kits. Male lions, when presented with evidence of MULTIPLE male lions in their territory, will still jump in to attack. Female lions, presented with evidence of multiple female lions in the same territory, will go get her sisters.

He posted the application of Occam's Razor to to situation described in TFA. Instead of grasping at straws and coming up with insanely convoluted reasons why girls "look" better but perform worse in school, he bluntly stated the most straightforward explanation.

That doesn't make his explanation correct, but class grades describe performance viewed through the social filter of the professor; test scores have no such filter.

At what point is writing an inflammatory post with nothing to back it up (his post is nothing more than "boys are smarter because I say so") trolling?

If it's just an "opinion" then there's nothing to argue against, because he's quoted no actual facts.

No arguing against? Maybe if you are living in the 19th century. It's not an opinion. It's irrational sexism, put into matter of fact phrasing. According to Logical Fallacy Bingo, this is "Wishful Thinking." What amazes me is that anyone would believe otherwise.

Understand that in average both sexes are not equally fit for every task and equally gifted in everything is not sexism it is lucidity. Sexism is to think that a member of one sex is always better than a member of the other in anything, which is obviously false.

Physically, men are stronger than women on average, but mentally it appears that it's entirely or nearly entirely cultural. In that case, saying that they're different on average in mental ability is at the very least supporting a sexist construct in our culture.

In average races are not equally fit for everything either. Most long range runners at the top, for example, are black people from African countries, for example. There are exceptions, but the vast majority follows the rule. That may applied to everything. There is no motive why a given group should be in average equally capable of doing any task as another one, except by a very unlikely coincidence.

Form and function are intertwined. It is simple science. Machines made with different ratios and different lengths are going to operate differently. Did you not learn about fulcrums and lever lengths? If you can't see the postural and physiological similarities of top athletes in their respective sports and how they appear different from other sports then you are just plain blind. If you don't understand that thousands of years of human adaptation to different diets and different climates has produced populations with forms adapted to those conditions(don't try to be a pedant asshole with this, all populations can contain all postures, which posture is dominant varies between cultures).

As for learning, do you not understand that regardless of all the similarities between male and female, the biggest difference is that all of our cells, including brain cells, are floating in a chemical soup that is greatly different between the two sexes. If you don't understand the effect of environment on gene expression...

There is one very large fundamental difference. "black" and "white" are socially perceived categories very loosely based on some genetic traits that relate to appearance.

Gender is a legitimate biological difference that has a massive impact biologically, chemically, and socially. It isn't a made up category based on some arbitrary perception of appearance but a real tangible distinction. I am of course not accounting for the oddball chromosomal flukes that sometimes pop up that can't be easily fit in either category.

But even on the race factor. Take out the political winds of today and the social taboo of suggesting a difference. In the US at least african slaves were literally breed for physical performance while the "white" counterparts succeeded in breeding on different standards particularly economic success which loosely correlates to management and leadership ability. The result is that those with african american heritage have a predisposition to a great count of high twitch muscle fibers that give them athletic advantages (it could be argued that since most african american's today actually are mixed to some degree that they may well enjoy the benefits of both breeding systems). This could well be argued to give them an advantage when performing manual labor.

It really is just a matter of time before we recognize that society isn't going to return to the barbaric practices of the past and the subject becomes less taboo and we admit that while races (or more properly genetic lines since our racial perceptions are bogus) and genders may or may not be "equal" by some particular metric they definitely are different and we shouldn't be afraid to acknowledge those differences.

Manual labor may not be highly valued in our society at present so skills there might be somehow be perceived as negative but "rule following" and social skills are actually extremely prized and rewarded in some areas. It could be argued that it highly desirable to have this in every level of management short of the CEO. While the highly intelligent/skilled lone wolf males are more suited to being the CEO he is only one executive. In most other cases you'd want them to be the talent that actually wows your clients and works solutions or the lower tiers of management that are effectively working in the same capacity using their minions as tools.

A lot of this discrepancy we see, is likely due to the huge push a few years back, to push girls more in school, not only in academic but the athletic parts too (section 9?)....

While it was a decent idea, the trouble is, they went wholeheartedly with the effort for pushing women up, but they dropped the ball severely on boys/men, and it is showing NOW in a large fashion.

Trouble is, it isn't politically correct to take male sides on issues (especially if they are Caucasian), and increase funding and programs to push our young men like we have the young women for the past decade or two...

But to go slightly off-topic, if someone says that black runners seem to have a significant advantage in high-performance sprinting due to physiology, and whites are generally weak in this area but are better at swimming, would that be considered racist...?

It would be racist (and un-scientific) to say that whites are poor runners or blacks are poor swimmers in general based on the sports record. It wouldn't be racist to simply point out the sports record factually. To make a hypothesis on possible physiological explanations of the difference gets into a gray area that's a hot point of ethical debate in science, example:

There are differences in all people, which are highlighted across ethnic and gender lines due to both biological and cultural factors. Discussing these differences should be okay, as racism and sexism is not in noticing the differences, it is in hating those who are different. We should be able to embrace each other in our differences without bigotry.

I disagree with quite a bit with what the GP said, but I do agree with teachers cutting them more slack. It's like speeding tickets. It's been my observation that females are a lot more likely to get a warning instead of a ticket from a cop than a guy. Girls are more likely to get emotional over the grades.

Maybe that creates an additional incentive for them to study (to avoid their emotional stress), or maybe it gives them additional incentive to use emotional manipulation. It's hard to tell.

Maybe that creates an additional incentive for them to study (to avoid their emotional stress)

Anecdotal evidence, but:

Social competition. For females, it's much, much more brutal and vicious, and happens earlier, than for males. In the schools I attended, girls were clique-ish and segregating themselves by the second grade. That shit didn't start happening for boys until around seventh grade, as I recall.

Girls who did badly? We ostracized them, led in fact by members of their own gender.

It doesn't seem terribly smart to me to destroy your own future because you don't follow the rules and don't work harder.

This is not a fair statement to make about children. Kids do not have the ability to look that far into the future. Girls aren't better students because they are thinking about their future careers, they are better students because of either biological differences and/or society norms that make them more obedient.

The best students are the ones whose parents do a good job of instilling values which will help them later in life. Almost any kid left to their own devices is just going to want to play.

Actually this article doesn't indicate that girls are better students. It clearly states that males are doing better on the tests and therefore were better students by the only definition that counts, their ability to absorb, comprehend, and apply the knowledge they were studying. The article indicates that girls are being inappropriately given grades they can't back up while boys are being inappropriately given lower grades than they deserve.

In other words, the article says more about the deficiency in teachers grading methods and criteria than it does about either girls or boys.

You're using the fact that women didn't receive the same education as men until.... well, the 1970s in the US as an excuse to continue in your misogyny. Not to mention that until about the 1920s, women's jobs were housewives, house maids and possibly cooks. After that, it expanded to secretary.

A very small proportion of the population have always been responsible for most of the creativity. As such, your observation indicates that there is a higher proportion of men amongst the smartest people, but it doesn't say anything about the general population.
Men have a broader distribution than women in just about everything. If this is also the case for smarts, that would give the same observation. It would also mean more men are at the bottom of society, which is the case.

You have all the evidence in the world, you just need to stop blindfolding yourself. Women are responsible for very little creation of about anything in this world, no matter which time span, location or field or you decide to analyze. Sure, there are exceptions, as in everything, but as a rule women are consumers, not creators.

If you were trying to say that women are underrepresented in STEM (and many other) fields you would be correct, but this is not due to some inherent inability or inferiority.

Women historically have been culturally handicapped by the need to birth and rear children, which consumes extraordinary amounts of time and energy. They have also been physically dominated by men due to sexual dimorphism. It is only in the last century that women have even been generally enfranchised in society. Since childbirth and rearing is much easier now, we are seeing the gaps between women and men close drastically in many fields. Eventually, as we no longer have a need for physically powerful men to protect their female counterparts from like, bears and shit, sexual dimorphism might even be bred out of the species (though it might take thousands of years).

Also, your comment of "as a rule women are consumers, not creators" is clearly ridiculous. There are many, many women in art, music, and literature who create extraordinary masterpieces. These fields have been historically more open to women than STEM and others, so the gap between male and female participation is narrower. There are also numerous brilliant, creative women in STEM fields...far too many to write them off as "exceptions".

If you were trying to say that women are underrepresented in STEM (and many other) fields you would be correct, but this is not due to some inherent inability or inferiority.

Why not? What proof do you have that this is not the case? Why would two distinct groups that share many biological differences be equally fit for everything, especially considering evidence points to the opposite direction. Why try to find convoluted explanations based on excuses that do not apply anymore if a simpler more logical explanation is available?

I understand that you want to believe in this impossible "equality" you indoctrinated yourself with, but that is simply not true. Equal rights betwee